... of Eternal Love 'at just the time when they were involved with the Weathermen. ' Correlation is not causality; in any case, Black notes that Tendler and May do not document any contact between the Weathermen and the Brotherhood, let alone Stark. As it stands the assertion is worthless, in other words. Friends, Frendz, the IRA, Howard Marks and...In Britain, according to Black, Stark's crucial contact was with 'the ex-Situationist Friends magazine': a nexus of psychedelia, political radicalism and armed struggle. Black quotes Steve Abrams: 'Dick Pountain takes Stark off to Friends magazine. It appears that Stark takes over the funding... ...

... , the explosion of inflation and so forth.(3 ) Part 1: Edward Heath and the rise of the City 'The Empire may have disintegrated and the UK may now be a third rate power, but the City of London has staged a comeback which would be the envy of any child movie star reaching maturity. ' - Professor Ira Scott, 1969(4 ) Edward Heath, who succeeded Harold Wilson as Prime Minister in 1970, is conventionally viewed as someone who began as 'Selsdon Man', a prototype of the later Thatcher Tory Party, then made his famous U-turn. This is half-true, at best. It is clear now that Heath ...

... the 'large, pipe-smoking Arabist, a veteran of of Suez and the Sudan', so described but not named in Anthony Verrier's Through the Looking Glass.(1 ) Smith quotes Steele as saying to the Provo leaders at the talks: 'I hope you're not going to start your bloody stupid campaign of violence again. If the IRA really wanted a united Ireland, it was wasting its time shooting British soldiers and bombing Northern Ireland into an industrial and social slum, ' he said. 'It would be better employed persuading the Protestants that they could have a good life in some sort of union with the South. ' (pp. 223/4 ) But Smith's ...

... at any of our Board meetings. I always sat as far away from him as possible: he suffered badly from halitosis. ' (p . 161) Colin Wallace/psy-ops One of the lines Colin Wallace at Information Policy tried to get the media to run about Northern Ireland in 1973/4 was the one about the IRA hiring US Army veterans to do their fighting for them. One such story was planted on Chapman Pincher who ran it in the Express. See Lobster 16 p. 15 where the Pincher story is reproduced. The story has resurfaced - and in the Express again. On 14 February 1997, its lead story said that the IRA sniper ...

... that Stark was involved with the CIA and had friends in the American Embassy'.(19) In 1972 Hamilton Macmillan, an MI6 officer and nephew of the former Tory Prime Minister, recruited Howard Marks, his old chum from Balliol College, Oxford, to spy on Jim McCann, a hash smuggler whom MI6 believed was a Provisional IRA contact in Amsterdam. Macmillan gave no indication that he knew Marks was already doing business with McCann, or that he knew Marks' name and address had turned up in the address book of arrested IRA volunteer, Dutch Doherty. (The address had been passed onto Doherty by McCann). MI6 did not appear to realise that the ...

... Tories' public sector deficit ran out of control in the 1990s. In the struggle for shrinking state resources in the last few years MI5 has come out on top, replacing the Soviet 'threat' with the terrorist 'threat', and actually expanding its personnel, while MI6 and GCHQ are tightening (pretty generous) belts. Let's hope the IRA, the animals rights movement, Green Anarchist and the anti-roads campaigners are suitably flattered to be the equivalent of the espionage services of a super-power! For all the welcome candour of some of his interviewees, there are still corns that Urban won't tread on. The whole 'Wilson plots' revelations of 1986-89, ...

... co.uk (Issue 31) June 1996 Last | Contents | Next Issue 31 The Nemesis File: the true story of an SAS execution squad Paul Bruce Blake Publishing, London 1995, 15.99 The pseudonymous author author claims to have been a member of a clandestine 4-man SAS squad which assassinated a couple of dozen alleged IRA members in the 1971-3 period in Northern Ireland. The author's taped and transcribed memories are intercut with sections from an uncredited ghost writer - apparently Nick Davies, the Maxwell-arms dealing version, not the investigative journalist - on the general political background. The central allegations come without any substantiating material and are thus impossible to evaluate ...

... diaries, leaflets, journals, minutes of meetings; some genuine, many forged.(69) For the most part IRD tried, yet again, to establish the insurgents as a part of the Soviet global conspiracy, but after the re-election of the Wilson government in 1974 they also began to try to show support for the IRA from a Labour Party influenced by the CPGB. (70) Although we know quite a lot about IRD's structure, we have evidence of some of its techniques, and we know about some of its book publishing activities, what we do not have are examples of IRD's work in mainland Britain. We know that there were IRD briefings ...

... journalism, but most of it propaganda inspired by the terrorists and their supporters.... ' (emphasis added) Boy, has Dillon changed his tune! As usual with British authors working this field, most of his sources are unnamed; but his 'former officer at the Yard', 'a contact in MI5', 'a senior IRA intelligence officer', 'a former general', 'a friend in the RUC' and so forth, tell a story of continuous internecine warfare between the various bureaucracies, and covert operations and counter-terror completely out of political control. Scotland Yard leaks against MI5 (p . 180); Anti-Terrorist Squad officers leak against MI5 ...

... is a very different tale from that told by de la Billiere. Later revelations with regard to members of the SAS embezzling funds while in Dhofar were to be a serious embarrassment. According to de la Billiere, for a while 22 SAS had 'the smell of corruption hanging over it' (p . 289). The War against the IRA When de la Billiere finally became Director of the SAS at the end of 1978, its main commitment was to combat terrorism both in Britain and in Northern Ireland. The expertise developed in this particular field has been widely celebrated, the ruthlessness displayed generally applauded: these are the men the IRA fear.(10) In fact, ...